Forgotten Heroes: Carol Kaye

Best Known For: One of the most
prolific bass players in history, Kaye has
logged more sessions than just about
any guitarist or bassist, including more
than 10,000 recording sessions with artists
like the Beach Boys, Sam Cooke,
Frank Zappa, Richie Valens, Simon &
Garfunkel, the Righteous Brothers, Ray
Charles, and many, many more.

If you want something done right, don’t
just do it yourself—hire a professional.
That was the prevailing mindset among
record producers back in the early ’60s,
especially when it came to making hits.
From the Brill Building to Motown to
Hollywood, pop music in America had
reached a fever pitch by the time the Beatles
crossed the pond, and the pressure was
always on to keep delivering the goods.
Sam Cooke’s soulful gravity, Diana Ross’
diva allure, or Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound
could easily spark a hit in those days, but a
song’s success hinged just as much on the
writers and session musicians who worked
tirelessly behind the scenes.

So who got these gigs, anyway? For most
recording dates, the first call was reserved
for players who had established reputations
for being reliable, versatile, and rock-solid
on their chosen instrument. And if you
were first call in Los Angeles, that probably
meant you were part of “The Clique”—a
loose collective of a few dozen young,
hungry jazz heads from the city’s thriving
nightclub scene that was later dubbed “the
Wrecking Crew” by drummer Hal Blaine.

Carol Kaye was one of those up-and comers,
and while for some it might be a bit
of a stretch to call her a forgotten hero of the
West Coast’s studio heyday, she’s certainly
long overdue for wider recognition. Her fluidly
picked Fender bass lines have propelled
classic songs by the Beach Boys, Simon &
Garfunkel, Joe Cocker, Frank Sinatra (and his
daughter Nancy), Ray Charles, Lou Rawls,
Glen Campbell, Barbra Streisand, Sonny
& Cher, and the Monkees, to name just a
few. In the ’60s and ’70s, Kaye was also the
go-to bassist for numerous record producers
and film score composers, including Quincy
Jones, Michel Legrand, Phil Spector, Lalo
Schifrin, David Axelrod, Jerry Goldsmith,
Henry Mancini, Billy Goldenberg, and way
too many more to mention here. She has
played on literally thousands of studio dates,
and that’s without even counting her years of
work on guitar—which is how she got her
start in 1957, on a session for Sam Cooke. At
the time, she was barely 21 years old.

“Most of the producers in the ’50s went
out to jazz clubs,” Kaye recalls today. “Some
of them were even jazz players themselves,
like Bumps Blackwell. He was a very fine
vibes player, and he managed Little Richard
and he was producing Sam Cooke. I was
playing guitar with the Teddy Edwards’ jazz
group—Ornette Coleman used to sit in
with us sometimes, because Billy Higgins
was the drummer. Bumps heard me playing,
and he needed a guitar player to step in
for René Hall, to play some fills in back of
Sam Cooke, so he asked me if I wanted the
job. Teddy and Billy knew Bumps, so I took
him up on it because I needed the money.
I remember on the way to the date, I heard
‘You Send Me’ on the radio. That prepared
me for what was coming.”

Learning from “the Hatch”
Born in 1935 in Everett, Washington,
Kaye grew up in a musical household:
Her father was a touring trombonist with
jazz big bands, while her mother played
piano professionally. In 1942, the family
moved to Wilmington, California. Four
years later, Kaye’s parents split up, but her
mother could see that 11-year-old Carol
was musically inclined, so she bought her a
$10 guitar. It wasn’t long before a friend of
Kaye’s suggested she look up the “hottest”
guitarist in nearby Long Beach—an experienced
teacher named Horace Hatchett—for
some lessons. Kaye had a natural aptitude
for the instrument, and within a few
months, she was helping “Hatch” teach
some of his other students.

Kaye’s apprenticeship gave her a solid
foundation in jazz rudiments, from Charlie
Christian to Django Reinhardt. By 14, she
was playing semi-pro jazz gigs and had saved
up enough through her work with Hatchett
to buy a Gibson Super 400, which she outfitted
with a DeArmond pickup for live gigs
(evidence indicates she likely used a Gibson
GA-20 amplifier). When Bumps Blackwell
found her several years later, she was playing
an Epiphone Emperor, which she brought
with her to the Sam Cooke session.

Needless to say, it was unusual for a
woman to be sitting elbow-to-elbow with
seasoned studio musicians in what was
widely accepted as a “man’s game” in the
late ’50s. “In my day, there were few who
could really cut it,” Kaye told MEOW
(Musicians for Equal Opportunities for
Women) online last year, “and we were very
welcome. Most of us had learned early on
to treat the men nice and fair, and how to
handle some of the obvious put-downs.
Usually we handled it with tart humor, giving
it back to them. And if all else failed,
then we just picked up our horns and blew
them away with music.”

Kaye’s first studio date with Cooke,
which yielded a steamy reworking of
Gershwin’s “Summertime” (the eventual
B-side of “You Send Me”), brought her a
wave of subsequent dates on guitar. Cooke
had been signed to Keen Records, which
employed Bob Keane as an A&R man.
Keane later discovered and managed Ritchie
Valens, who recorded “La Bamba” in 1958
with a backing group that featured Kaye on
acoustic guitar, Valens on electric rhythm,
René Hall on lead guitar, Bill Pitman
on bass, and Earl Palmer on drums. “La
Bamba” was one of Kaye’s first sessions with
Palmer, and it sealed a lifelong friendship
between the two.

“La Bamba” was also tracked at Gold
Star Studios in Hollywood—one of a
ring of independent studios (including
Western Recorders and Sunset Sound)
that was churning out hits in the late
’50s and early ’60s. As it happened, Phil
Spector had taken up de facto residence at
Gold Star, and by 1961 he was regularly
booking studio time and working with a
number of different vocal groups, including
the Crystals, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue
Jeans, the Paris Sisters, and more. Kaye
played guitar—sometimes the Epiphone,
sometimes a Gibson 12-string, and later, a
Fender Jazzmaster—on many of these sessions,
including the 1962 Blue Jeans hit
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and the Crystals’
classic “Then He Kissed Me.” But her profile
kicked into high gear on the Spector-produced
sides for the Righteous Brothers,
which included “You’ve Lost That Lovin’
Feelin’,” released in 1964. Kaye’s acoustic
guitar part stands out prominently against
Bill Medley’s lead vocal, revealing the
essence of her style—a solid, steady rhythm
accentuated by individually picked notes
articulated with clarity and precision.

Bass Is the Place
By this time, Kaye was part of an elite
and loosely connected group of guns for
hire—accomplished jazz musicians who
were suddenly making a career out of playing
pop, rock, and R&B. And then one
day in 1963, she showed up for a session at
Capitol Studios that changed everything.

“At that point, I’d been hired on guitar
for five years,” she says. “I never even
thought I’d ever play bass. That thought
just never occurred to me, but on that day,
the bass player didn’t show up, so they
put me on bass and I found that I liked
it immediately. I saw the potential for it,
because I realized then that a lot of the hit
records depended upon the role of the bass.
And it was much more fun to invent on
bass than the rinky-dinky guitar stuff that I
had to do. It just felt comfortable.”

As she had on guitar, Kaye quickly
established a signature sound. The Fender
Precision was the favored axe of the day, but
it was often supplemented on studio recordings
with an upright bass to lend some
roundness to the low end, or a Danelectro
bass guitar to add a more prominent “click”
to a picked bass line. Kaye played with a
pick, but eventually she devised a way to
cover all three bass sounds, using a combination
of tone control and muting.

“Guitar players would use a piece of felt
intertwined between the strings and behind
the bridge to get a nice sound,” she recalls.
“So I noticed right away that I had to do
the same thing for electric bass, because
the thicker basses had a terrible time with
overtones and undertones, which killed the
sound. The minute I put the mute on the
top of the strings, in front of the bridge—
there was no way to get a mute behind
the bridge because that was the end of the
strings—I noticed the tone immediately. I
mean, for 25 cents, you could get the best
sound in town [laughs].”

Kaye usually played at low volume in
the studio and preferred the sound of guitar
amps. She bought two Fender Super Reverbs,
one of which would be carted to every studio
date before she arrived. Eventually, she went
for a smaller enclosure with the Versatone
Pan-O-Flex. As she got busier, she rotated
three of these for her studio work and kept
one at home. For years, she used a sunburst
Fender Precision with flatwound strings.
She kept the action high, which meant she
had to play hard to be heard—no easy feat if
you were doing fast left-hand changes or uptempo
“boogaloo” lines.

One up-and-coming producer who took
note of Kaye’s versatility was future legend
Brian Wilson. An avowed fan of Spector’s
“Wall of Sound” production style—at
Spector’s invitation, he’d even dropped in
several times at Gold Star—Wilson wanted
to expand the Beach Boys’ established “surf
rock” sound into something much more
lush and sophisticated. The changes in
direction he suggested were destined to sow
the first well-documented seeds of dissent
within the band, but Wilson forged ahead
by hiring outside pros to get the sound
he heard in his head. Kaye was among
the group of musicians recruited in early
1965 to record backing tracks for Today!
and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!),
released in rapid succession that spring
and summer.

Essential Listening
Besides the obvious classics by the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, and more, here are
a few gems that showcase Carol Kaye’s uncanny versatility.

Joe PassBetter Days (1971)
Swinging, solid, and
shockingly funky, Better
Days is rife with grooves
(anchored by Kaye on
electric bass, Ray Brown
on upright, and Earl
Palmer on drums) that
could move any hip-hop
producer to go sample-crazy.
Of course, it helps
to have Pass laying down
his crisp guitar licks
and Joe Sample digging
hard into Fender
Rhodes and clavinet.

Ray Pizzi, Carol Kaye,
and Mitch HolderThumbs Up (1998)
From Kaye’s opening
bass line on “Green
Dolphin Street” to
Pizzi’s stirring sax
melodies on “Freefall,”
this live set, recorded
in L.A., dips, walks,
and shimmies with a
lounge-jazz feel from
another era.

Matthew SweetIn Reverse [1999]
As Kaye’s first true
“rock” session since the
’60s, this album says
everything about why
she has been in demand
for so long. Her steady,
thumping bass infuses
songs like “Faith in
You” with an irresistible,
head-nodding urgency.

“Brian was a nice, sharp young kid,
and he caught on real fast,” Kaye recalls.
“He usually knew what he wanted, and
he wrote his own parts—which was very
different from other recording dates we
did. He was open to the guitars making
up some parts, as well as drums, but he
wanted me to play his notes on bass,
which was fine—he wrote some great
parts that fit well with what he intended
for the rest of the arrangement.”

Kaye was one of three bassists—the
others being Ray Pohlman and Lyle
Ritz—whom Wilson would turn to
most frequently for sessions throughout
1966 and ’67. On the Beach Boys’ classic
Pet Sounds, she became a key anchoring
presence, with Wilson pushing her
forward in the mix on songs like “Sloop
John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” By
the time Wilson got around to recording
tracks for Smile—the grandiose but
ultimately ill-fated magnum opus that
pushed him into a spiral of self-doubt
and seclusion—the sessions were reaching
marathon proportions, but Kaye and
the other players took it in stride.

“He’d spend three or four hours on
one song, whereas usually in a three-hour
record date we’d cut four or five
tunes,” Kaye told author Mark Dillon
for Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys: The
Songs That Tell Their Story, published in
June. “We played every tune and every
take like a hit record. It got a little boring
because Brian would change things
back and forth all the time. But we
stuck it out because we knew what he
was doing and we admired him. And
that admiration and respect got across
to him and helped him to grow and feel
safe with us.”

That mutual trust was the driving
force behind “Good Vibrations,” the
centerpiece of Smile. Cobbled together
from multiple dates and takes, the
official version contains possibly five
different performances on bass. Kaye
remembers the descending figure in the
opening verse as hers, and she certainly
played the song in its entirety on at least
one session at Western’s Studio 3.

While Kaye’s work for the Beach Boys
alone could cement her place in rock ’n’
roll history, her discography for the 10-year
stretch between 1963 and ’73 is so vast that
it borders on the superhuman. See the sidebar
to the right for some of the more colorful
highlights.

Hallmarks of Kaye's Style

First and foremost, Carol Kaye is a jazz player, but what really
informs her approach to the bass is her technical foundation on guitar.
In the ’60s, most session bassists played with flatwound strings
and a pick (with James Jamerson, who always played with his index
finger, being one of the key exceptions). Bass pickups had lower output
back then, so the strings had to be plucked with authority, and
roundwound strings tended to chew up a pick in short order.

The basics of Kaye’s guitar style come through in her earliest
recordings from the late ’50s and early ’60s. The sound of her
Epiphone Emperor sometimes captured Django Reinhardt’s acoustic
tone, but the melody and rhythm were usually stripped down,
simple, and direct—de rigueur for pop ballads with a rock ’n’ roll or
soul flavor. Fig. 1 is a straightforward F#m–C# vamp similar to many
of those she was asked to play. While parts like these were rarely
demanding from a technical standpoint, they still had to be delivered
repeatedly and flawlessly—no mean feat when you’re on the clock in
a studio.

Kaye was rarely satisfied with playing a straight bass part. She
loved the opportunity to play more melodic lines that made use of
the upper register (Fig. 2), as was often the case when an upright bass
was brought in to round out the low end. For parts likes this example,
she used a simple rhythmic motif and moved it down gracefully
through the changes, focusing on chord tones and syncopation.

Sometimes Kaye improvised between takes if she felt a part wasn’t
working. Over a simple C7 groove, she would play something like
Fig. 3. Combining a slight twist of syncopation with simple note
choices and a solid time-feel, she could liven up a bass line that a few
minutes earlier had been lackluster.

The Big Score, the Big Break …
and the Big Payback
On top of her work in rock, pop, and R&B,
Kaye was equally in demand for film and
television scores—perhaps most famously
with Lalo Schifrin, whose Mission: Impossible
theme remains an iconic blast of late-
’60s pop culture. She also contributed to
Schifrin’s Bullitt soundtrack, including some
of the cues that lead up to the film’s iconic
car-chase scene. “He wanted me to invent all
kinds of notes and double-time,” Kaye recalls
with amusement, “and I just looked at him
like he was crazy, because the tempo he was
asking for was so fast. But I did it, and I just
cringe when I hear it because it’s a boogaloo
in double-time—I mean, fast.”

Many of the scores being composed in
the late ’60s and early ’70s were complex
orchestral affairs, and thus perfectly suited
for Kaye’s jazz background. With Quincy
Jones in particular, there was a musical symbiosis
that carried over into the making of
1967’s In the Heat of the Night, for example.
On kinetic cues like “Nitty Gritty Time,”
Kaye matches the percussive horn hits
punch-for-punch, demonstrating an innate
sense of knowing when not to play.

“By its content, we knew this was a ‘heavy’
movie, and the music was powerful,” Kaye says.
“I played the Fender, but Quincy liked me on
the [Maestro] Fuzz-Tone with my Danelectro
bass guitar, too. So during the breaks, I’d
unplug all the pedals to jam some bebop, and
then it was back to the deep emotional music
of the film. Quincy is a genius, there’s no
doubt about it. He wrote some of the most
beautiful themes I’ve ever heard in my life—let
alone had the pleasure of playing on.”

Around 1969, Kaye took a brief break from
recording to write an instructional book—as
a single mother, she had bills to pay, but she
also loved spending time with her kids. How
to Play the Electric Bass became a trend-setting
bible, and eventually led to a whole line of
books and videos that Kaye continues to build
on. It was a completely different mindset from
the coffee-driven routine of playing long hours
in the studio, and it may have had something
to do with Kaye’s decision, in the early ’70s,
to cut back on her freelance hours and commit
to some more in-depth collaboration. She
recorded and toured with Joe Pass, and then
with Hampton Hawes, and was still doing
studio dates as late as 1976, when she was
sidelined after a car accident.

Kaye kept it up into the ’80s, appearing
on J.J. Cale’s Shades in 1981, but the
physical toll of her injuries eventually forced
her to take a lengthier hiatus from playing
and performing. After corrective surgery in
1994, she gradually found her way back to
the instrument, and by 1997 she was working
with Brian Wilson again—this time on
his daughters’ debut The Wilsons. In 1999,
Kaye was invited to play on the entirety
of Matthew Sweet’s outstanding In Reverse
album, which reintroduced her to a ravenous
new school of rock, soul, and hip-hop artists.
Pixies frontman Frank Black recruited her for
his 2006 album Fast Man Raider Man, as did
longtime Beastie Boys collaborator Money
Mark for 2007’s Brand New by Tomorrow.
Both projects reunited Kaye with legendary
drummer Jim Keltner—another late-’60s fixture
on the Hollywood session scene.

A Legacy of Rocking Steady
One thing that has always distinguished Kaye’s
playing, whether she’s digging into a jazz, pop,
soul, or rock bass line, is her firm sense of
pocket. Above all else, first-call musicians had
to be able to hold down a steady rhythm—no
click tracks allowed (or even considered, for
that matter). It’s a simple but somehow elusive
concept that she still imparts to her students,
if only because its importance seems to have
diminished in the relentlessly programmed
experience of making music today.

“For everybody back then, the main consideration
was time,” Kaye explains, “especially
in the jazz world. Even the finest of
drummers—I mean, Billy Higgins practiced
with an electric metronome beating on two
and four, because when you played jazz,
everybody has to be of one mind. With the
intertwined thing that goes on, one person’s
playing directly affects the others. There’s
no such thing as the bass player’s role, or
the drummer’s role, or the piano’s role.
They’re not separate in jazz, see, but in rock
’n’ roll and fusion they are, and that’s where
you have to be prepared. A lot of people
today are just into flash, but we were never
concerned with that. Music only sounds
good when it’s played with the greatest of
time, and that’s what we did, absolutely.”

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